The First Nonstop Flight Across the Atlantic Lasted
16 Harrowing Hours
John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew across
the Atlantic with the help of a sextant, whisky and coffee
in 1919—eight years before Charles Lindbergh's flight.
SSPL/Getty
Images
Published: June 13, 2019
Last Updated: May 27, 2025
If you’d have stopped reading
there, you might think that Alcock and Brown’s journey had ended in failure.
For 16 fraught hours, they’d been trapped in a rudimentary airplane in abysmal
weather, their only means of navigation a sextant, an instrument that measured
celestial objects in relation to the horizon. Their journey had been beset with
blunders, and more often than not, fog and clouds had covered the stars, making
it nearly impossible for Brown to determine their location.
John Alcock (center) holds a
model of their biplane alongside Arthur Whitten Brown (center right), who is
holding a mailbag after completing the first nonstop transatlantic flight. They carried several items of mail with them and
in doing so, effectively transported the first transatlantic airmail to
Britain.
SSPL/Getty Images
Yet their journey was a
triumph. Despite their graceless landing in a bog on June 15, 1919, Alcock and
Brown were the first people ever to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly
a decade before Charles
Lindbergh caught the world’s attention with his own transatlantic
flight, the flying duo made history. Their adventure paid off: The pair not
only became pioneering aviators but beat out a group of other pilots vying for
a huge cash prize in a cut-throat competition to be the first transatlantic
aviators.
The prize was the brainchild of
Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe, a British newspaper tycoon who
owned The Daily Mail, one of England’s
most influential newspapers. Like many magnates of his day, Lord Northcliffe
was fascinated
by new modes of transportation. Air flight was still a novelty, and a group of
pioneering aviators, funded by rich patrons like Northcliffe, wanted to know
just how far the technology could be pushed.
Northcliffe was a founding
member of England’s Aero Club, a group of aviation enthusiasts interested in
expanding and popularizing air flight. In 1906, he offered
a 10,000-pound purse to the first balloonist to fly from London to Manchester. Ten
thousand pounds was an enormous amount of money at the time—worth over
600,000 dollars today.
Northcliffe continued offering
prizes for aviation accomplishments, which brought attention to his newspaper
as well as stimulated competition among aviators. The prize purses were also
part of a larger trend of widely publicized technological competitions that
rewarded people who adopted new technologies like air flight.
The public followed along as
intrepid motorists, cyclists and pilots set new milestones in their fields,
slowly pushing the new technology to its limits. Air prizes were handed out
to pilots who broke records in everything from speed to distance, and those who
competed and won became celebrities.
Northcliffe’s most ambitious
prize offering was for a transatlantic flight. The prize offered 10,000 pounds
to a pilot who not only crossed the Atlantic from somewhere in North America to
Great Britain or Ireland—a feat that had yet to be accomplished—but who did it
within 72 hours.
The planes of the 1910s were so primitive that the prize seemed almost
impossible to win. World War
I changed that. The Great War put a temporary stop to the
competition, but it also pushed plane technology to new heights, as air flight
became a tool of war. In turn, the aviation industry grew and the technology
behind flight improved
dramatically. By the end of the war, a group of war-hardened pilots—and planes
that had been weapons of war—were ready to vie for the prize.
Among them were Alcock and
Brown, both military pilots and prisoners of war during World War I. During his
imprisonment, Alcock dreamed of crossing the Atlantic via plane. Once the war
ended, he set about making his dream come true.
Vickers Vimy twin-engined
biplane, a converted WWI bomber, flown by former RAF fliers John Alcock and
Arthur Whitten Brown on their nonstop transatlantic flight.
Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The
LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
His aspiration was shared by
other aviators. Multiple teams of pilots and aircraft manufacturers vied for
the prize and failed
again and again. In May 1919, a group of Navy and Coast Guard airmen
flew
across the Atlantic in the NC-4, a seaplane that took three weeks,
and multiple stops, to get across the ocean. But since Northcliffe’s contest
was only open to non-military flyers, and required the journey be completed in
72 hours with no stops, the NC-4 made history but didn’t win the prize.
Another team backed by British
aircraft company Handley Page wanted to beat Alcock and Brown and shipped a plane
to Newfoundland in preparation for the flight. Alcock and Brown were there,
too, with a Vickers Vimy bomber that had been modified for transatlantic
flight. On June 14, 1919, while the Handley Page team languished as its leaders
conducted flight tests, Alcock and Brown started their flight attempt.
It was a disaster. The takeoff
was bumpy and treacherous. Then the radio failed. Fog overwhelmed the pilots,
making navigation—conducted by sextant—next to impossible. Soon, the plane was
covered in ice. Sitting in an open cockpit, the men began to freeze. At times,
Alcock lost control of the plane entirely, plunging toward the sea. At another,
their engine stopped working, choked by ice.
“We looped the loop,” Alcock
recalled. “We did some very comic stunts, for I had no sense of the horizon.”
Blinded by the weather and
uncertain of their exact location, the men flew and flew. Fueled
by sandwiches, coffee and whisky, they passed the time by singing and worrying
about whether the punishing weather would destroy their fuel tanks.
The first nonstop
transatlantic flight ended with a nosedive into a bog in western Ireland. The
pilots walked away unscathed.
Topical Press Agency/Getty
Images
Finally, improbably, they
realized they were over land. But it wasn’t a smooth landing. Rather, they
nosedived the plane into a bog in Ireland. The men were dazed, but elated. They
may have crashed, but they had just made history.
They had hoped the press could
find out about their landing via wireless radio, but the radio had gone out so
early in the flight that they couldn’t inform them of their victory. Instead,
they telegraphed the Aero Club. Later, Alcock sent a cable to the Daily Mail about the journey. “The flight
has shown that the Atlantic flight is practicable,” he wrote.
It was a monumental feat.
Alcock and Brown were front-page news, and their feat pointed to a future in
which crossing an ocean was a commonplace affair. After winning the prize
money, which was presented by British aviation secretary Winston
Churchill, the duo was knighted by George V.
Alcock did not live to enjoy
knighthood: He died later in 1919 when the plane he was piloting, another
Vickers aircraft, crashed in France. But Brown, who had navigated the flight
through such tough conditions, continued flying. During World War II, he worked
for the British Home Guard and Royal Air Force. He died a few years after his
son, Arthur Brown, was killed in a plane crash.
So what did the navigator think
of the pioneering flight that had been such a challenge? Despite the fear, the
cold, and the lack of stars by which to navigate, the flight had been a triumph
of man and machine. After crash-landing, Alcock and Brown were picked up by
wireless radio operators who fed them breakfast and helped them telegraph their
success. “This is the best way to cross the Atlantic,” Brown said…after
finishing his food.
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